REA Group rolls out IT incident management system

REA Group has rolled out a new ticketing project in six weeks, with the group that publishes realestate.com.au saying the system now manages all IT incidents at the business.

REA's IT service delivery manager Damian Fasciani said the project was part of a redesign at the company, with the IT team changing the structure of many IT operations.

“Our ticketing system had all the bells and whistles, was very complicated and wasn’t doing the job it needed to for a company of REA’s nature,” Fasciani said.

“That prompted me to rip that system out and to go to market and look for a ticketing system that suited what REA needed.”

After going to market and narrowing the search down to three vendors, Fasciani said REA chose to partner with Zendesk; initially rolling out its internal support ticket platform and then expanding the system across its call centre and development teams.

“Zendesk is the core ticketing system used by IT operations, the development team that looks at our sites, and it manages all our technical report incidents,” he said.

“It manages technical issues with our call centre, and we have integration with Zendesk and other systems...it manages all IT incidents.”

After a six-week implementation process, Fasciani said the use of Zendesk at REA has grown, with the number of licences jumping from 10 to 120 since October, and REA set to purchase another 20 this week.

“We’ve had HR and the legal teams who wanted to jump onto it earlier on this year,” he said.

“We were a bit hesitant purely because we would have to modify the front pages of Zendesk and those modifications would have been seen by all of IT but Zendesk has now introduced a new licencing model that will allow us to segregate changes for legal and HR.”

Since REA Group first rolled out Zendesk, it has hooked the system into its ERP program and has gained more transparency in its internal operations, according to Fasciani.

“The problem with our former ticketing system was around transparency and where things sat within the IT service delivery team, and we had issues originally of 300 tickets in progress and some of those were months old,” he said.

“It is [now] extremely easy to look at and see where the progress is at and the REA staff have the ability to look at where the tickets sit.”

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